FAQ rich results will only be available for “well-known, authoritative government and health websites”. Other sites won’t receive FAQ rich results “regularly” (which is not the same as saying “ever”). We have yet to see what Google considers an authoritative site or health site, but this is one of the many questions we endeavour to answer in the coming weeks.

How-to rich results, on the other hand, will exclusively appear on desktop and no longer be visible to mobile users. That said, with Google’s mobile-first indexing, websites should still include HowTo markup on both their mobile and desktop site to achieve the How-to rich result on desktop.

Even though this change will not have an impact on search rankings, websites that leverage FAQ and How-to rich results will likely see a decline in traffic and impressions from these rich results on the Google Search Console performance report.

This announcement garnered strong reactions from the SEO community, as many mourned the loss of some of their best-performing (and content-heavy) rich results. In response to some of the tweets, John Mueller referenced “the tragedy of the commons”, and other SEOs remarked on the overuse of FAQs, in particular, as “spammy”.

Independent of abuse / over-use, things can change on the web / with users / with focus shifts, and it’s important to clean up from time to time. (And it’s a good reminder to read up about the tragedy of the commons :-)).

— John Mueller (official) · #MaybeABot (@JohnMu) August 8, 2023

But Mueller also recommended SEOs “really focus on structured data to make your pages eligible for a specific treatment in search. Additional structured data can be useful to understand the content better, but [he] wouldn’t assume there’s a visible effect / ranking change.”

What Schema Performance Analytics is Showing

We are monitoring the industry data from Schema Performance Analytics on a daily basis to see when the changes announced take place.

We have seen varied results after August 8th. We have seen drops in FAQ performance in some of our clients.

As of August 14, we’ve seen a decline in FAQ performance on mobile for customers in the Healthcare Industry, while FAQ performance on desktop remains stable. Stay tuned for more updates on FAQ performance.

Schema App Perspective on this Change

Here are our key takeaways from this change:

1. Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results.
2. Continue adding connected schema markup to support machine understanding.
3. Create quality content that prioritizes a human audience.

These three recommendations are already considered best practices here at Schema App and what we already work on with our customers.

Focus on targeting a diverse range of rich results

At Schema App, we’ve seen lots of fluctuations from various rich results over time. As such, we always recommend diversifying the rich results in your portfolio.

Google’s goal is to provide searchers with the best quality results, and we’ve seen them make countless changes to the algorithm or the SERP to inch closer to that goal.

Whenever Google makes a change like this, we’ve been able to detect the drop in performance and test solutions to help our customers overcome them. For example, FAQs not being granted unless questions matched keywords exactly or videos needing to be the main content of the page to achieve a Video rich result. Our approach to this announcement is no different.

FAQ rich results have historically performed well for many of our customers. It brought more website content to the SERP and allowed the inclusion of HTML to improve the readability of the answers and embed hyperlinks. We will continue to monitor FAQ rich results to see who Google awards this rich result to and look for opportunities for our customers to qualify for it.

In the meantime, our customer success managers will work closely with our customers to identify other rich result opportunities and ways to improve their content to achieve a wider range of rich results.

Continue adding connected Schema Markup to support machine understanding

At its core, Schema Markup is a code that helps machines better understand the content on your page.

As Google and Bing accelerate their AI search capabilities, they will need to overcome the challenge of AI hallucinations to achieve a reasonable level of efficacy. By adding Schema Markup to your site, you can provide search engines with reliable, structured content that they can use to train and hone the accuracy of their Large Language Models.

Google might have eliminated the FAQ rich result but there is still an opportunity for your organization to appear in their Search Generative Experience (SGE).

If you want Google to provide an accurate answer regarding your organization in their new AI search experience, adding robust, semantic Schema Markup on your site is necessary. Doing so will allow your organization to generate a marketing knowledge graph from the content on your site. AI search engines can then use this knowledge graph to provide users with more accurate information about your organization.

Conclusion

We will be sharing more insights on the situation as Google rolls out the changes to FAQ and How-To rich results in the next week. Our team is also actively testing various alternative solutions to ensure our customers continue to see great results from implementing Schema Markup.

If you have more questions, please reach out to your assigned customer success manager or support@schemaapp.com.

The post Changes to FAQ and How-to rich results on Google appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

The decline was first noticed on April 5 for FAQ rich results on mobile and subsequently affected results on desktop starting May 4. As a result, the clicks, impressions and CTR for many FAQ rich results dropped.

After monitoring the situation for a few weeks, pages with FAQ rich results have shown little signs of recovery without changes to the content.

What we do know:

• Nothing has changed in terms of Google’s Structured Data requirements and documentation. The FAQ instances remain valid for Google’s rich results on Google Search Console. 
• Google is reducing the number of FAQ rich results it is showing. Various SEOs have also noticed this decline, but there hasn’t been any official comment from Google. 
• Despite the decline, most of our customers are still achieving FAQ rich results for a number of queries. This is where it gets interesting and where we see an opportunity for optimization.

Opportunity for FAQ optimization 

Upon observing this decline, our Customer Success team dug deeper into the FAQ rich results to find potential solutions and recommendations for our customers. We observed that the issue was country and device-agnostic, so we honed in on the queries in Google Search Console to see what might be affecting the performance of the FAQ rich results.

To start, we identified individual pages that saw a decline in FAQ performance but were still awarded the FAQ rich result. For each of these pages, we looked at the top queries that previously achieved an FAQ rich result and compared it to the existing queries that were still achieving an FAQ rich result, and we noticed a trend.

The Schema App Customer Success team discovered that if the frequently asked question on a page did not align with the query, the page would no longer be awarded an FAQ rich result. 

For example: Our blog article ‘What is Schema Markup?’ used to get awarded the FAQ rich result for queries such as:

• What is Schema org
• Schema Markup Seo
• Types of Schema Markup
• What is Schema Markup

The questions with the FAQ markup on the article were:

• What is Schema Markup?
• Why is it important to add Schema Markup to your pages?
• What types of Schema Markup are there?
• How can Schema Markup be implemented?

The first two queries – What is Schema org and Schema Markup SEO – that were previously awarded the FAQ rich result did not align with the questions on the blog post.

These two queries saw the largest decline in impressions on Google Search Console after May 4. Even though the page itself is still ranking for that keyword, Google is no longer awarding an FAQ rich result for pages with questions that broadly match or are related to the query.

On the flip side, the last two queries – Types of Schema Markup & What is Schema Markup – aligned with the questions in the article and continued to be awarded the FAQ rich results even after May 4.

Logically, this makes sense. If Google’s main objective is to provide users with the highest quality and relevant search results, showing users FAQs with irrelevant content doesn’t really align with that objective. What this means is that you want to target queries that have a high search volume and relevancy to your audience.

Our Customer Success team is currently working with Schema App customers to update their FAQ content with what the data is showing as targeted queries and measure the impact on their FAQ rich result performance.

If you are looking for ways to optimize the performance FAQ rich results after the April and May decline, you can follow these steps.

1. Login to Google Search Console and click on the ‘Search Results’ tab on the left menu bar.
2. Review key URLs that have seen a significant decline in FAQ performance but continue to achieve FAQ rich results.
3. Look at the queries that have seen a decline after May 4.
4. Review FAQ content on your page and check if it is aligned with the search queries that you want to target. If they are not aligned, update your FAQ content on page to align them with your targeted search queries.

As seen in our previous rich result weather reports, Google’s rich results are prone to fluctuations and that is why we emphasize heavily on the importance of diversifying your rich results. As the search engine result page changes, you have to proactively manage your Schema Markup and content to maintain your visibility in search.

At Schema App, our Customer Success team does more than just leverage our tools to author and deploy Schema Markup at scale for our customers. They also utilize Schema Performance Analytics to measure results, observe trends and dive deep into the data to provide recommendations to help our customers grow their organic results.

If you are interested to see how our end-to-end Schema Markup solution can help your organization leverage Schema Markup to drive traffic or gear up for AI search, get in touch with our team today.

The post May 2023 Rich Results Weather Report: FAQ Fluctuations & Optimization Strategy appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

2023 started off on a calm note with very few changes in rich results performance, but since the March Broad Core Update, we’ve seen a few big swings happen on the search engine results page, particularly with Video and FAQ rich results.

Based on our industry data, we’ve seen most of the changes happen after an announcement from Google – whether that be a core update or a documentation update on how they are displaying specific rich results. However, there are also changes on the search engine results page that happen unannounced by Google.

Here’s what our industry data is showing us from the past few months.

Video Rich Result Changes

Effective April 13, 2023, Google has simplified the video presentation on the search engine results page. Prior to this change, video thumbnails were shown in two different ways.

1. Pages that had a video as the main content of the page would show up with this listing format on the SERP.

2. Pages that had a video present on a page but not as the main element of the page would show up with this listing format on the SERP.

Today, Google is no longer awarding a video rich result to pages that do not have the video as the main content. However, if the video is the main content of the page, the video rich results will continue to show.

After April 13, we’ve seen the clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results drop by over 95% for all our clients and the numbers slowly improved after April 21st, as a result of customers making video the main content on a page.

Read Google’s Video SEO best practices guide to learn how you can help Google find your video and optimize it for search. If you are a Schema App enterprise customer, your Customer Success Manager will provide you with content recommendations to optimize your videos.

FAQ Rich Results Fluctuations

Our relationship with FAQ rich results is tumultuous at best.

Around April 5th 2023, we saw the clicks and impressions for FAQ rich results on a downward trend.

This drop was mainly for FAQ rich results on mobile as mentioned by other SEOs.

Quick update on the drop in FAQ snippets on mobile & the drop in video snippets in the SERPs.

FAQ snippets remain down on mobile based on the change on 4/5. And video snippets have plummeted for sites where the videos are not the main content (starting on 4/13). No change there: pic.twitter.com/M0406FPGWG

— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) April 29, 2023

Even though the numbers show signs of slow recovery after April 18, we saw the clicks and impressions for FAQ rich results on desktop and mobile dropped drastically on the weekend of May 7. We’ve yet to see any confirmed algorithm changes or comments from Google regarding this issue.

Despite being one of the top-performing rich results on the search engine results page, FAQ rich results have historically been notorious with their fluctuations. We saw the performance for FAQ rich results fluctuate in May, August, September and October of 2022.

We have yet to isolate the reason for this decline but it looks like Google is reducing how often it is awarding a rich result and the queries that might be achieving them.

Moreover, we aren’t seeing this across all our clients, in fact some clients are seeing gains. This leads us to believe that it could be based on the quality of content.

In an unofficial statement on Mastodon, John Mueller also mentioned that “sites love adding FAQ markup, it gives them more room in search, and at some point, it makes the results less useful. The right balance makes sense to re-evaluate from time to time, like with any other search element.”

As a result, our Customer Success team keeping a close eye on the situation and revisiting the schema markup strategy to make content recommendations to drive results. This is also why we urge our customers to diversify their content and rich results, to reduce dependency on individual rich results to drive traffic.

Google Updates: Generative AI on Search

Google’s I/O developer conference also happened today and recent reports from Wall Street Journal and New York Times have leaked potential changes that Google might be making to the search engine results page prior to the conference.

During the keynote speech at the conference, Google unveiled the addition of generative AI to their search engine results page. Users will still need to type a query, but the generative AI search engine will provide users will answer directly on the SERP with links to websites, snippets of content and ads. Users can also ask follow-up questions to get more specific responses.

Image: Google

This change is a departure from the traditional search results and could explain the recent changes in FAQ and video rich results. But more importantly, Google’s Search Generative Experience will still require a data source to identify information from trusted websites and sources. This is where Schema Markup comes to play.

Watch our ‘How Marketers Can Leverage Schema Markup and Prepare for AI-Search’ webinar recording to learn why Schema Markup and your Knowledge graph are important for AI and machine learning.

The post April 2023 Rich Results Weather Report: Video & FAQ Fluctuations appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Schema Markup, also known as Structured Data, is a standardized vocabulary that helps search engines like Google understand the information on your web pages.

What are the Benefits of Schema Markup?

When your pages contain Schema Markup, it allows search engines and AI powered machines to gain a deep, semantic understanding of your website content, which offers a host of SEO related benefits for your business.

Schema Markup also enables search engines to display your content as a rich result under certain circumstances. These rich results are displayed prominently on the SERP and include extra information about a page, like ratings and reviews of local businesses.

However, as rich results come and go, the one thing that remains consistent is the semantic value of Schema Markup.

Here are some of the top benefits of Schema Markup.

1. Help Search Engines Better Understand Your Content

Humans are great at inferring the meaning of online content. Google, on the other hand, has to teach its tech to understand your content using machine learning.

That’s why search engines need extra help interpreting the meaning and intent of your site content. You can assist them by adding semantic Schema Markup to your web pages.

Schema Markup is a standardized vocabulary developed by Google, Yandex, Yahoo, and Bing. As such, these search engines can easily interpret the Structured Data on your page, allowing the algorithms to present users with content that better aligns with their search intent. It also helps search engines be more efficient because their machine learning and algorithms are built to understand Schema Markup.

2. Build a Knowledge Graph and Re-Use It Within Your Organization

At Schema App, we do more than just generate Schema Markup. We utilize our semantic technologies to generate connected Schema Markup to build a reusable marketing knowledge graph. This knowledge graph can then be used to inform search engines or train your LLMs using structured information about your business.

When you implement connected Schema Markup, you are defining the objects in your content as individual entities with their own properties and relationships to other entities. Once defined, these entities can be connected with the people, places, things and concepts that other authorities have described like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s Knowledge Graph. Your Schema markup can even enhance your Google Knowledge Panel in search.

Building a knowledge graph using Schema Markup enables search engines to better understand the connections between your content, your organization, and other entities on the web. Search engines can use this information to infer new knowledge with greater context and accuracy.

At Schema App, we implement semantic Schema Markup and entity linking to assist customers in developing their knowledge graph. This knowledge graph enables search engines to effectively match your page with user search queries, driving higher qualified traffic and boosting click-through rates.

3. Be AI-Search Ready

Search engines are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to provide users with more relevant answers to their queries. By implementing Schema Markup, you can enhance search engines’ understanding of your content. This, in turn, enables them to accurately match your content with your target audience, ensuring a more precise and effective user experience.

In Google’s podcast titled, “Structured Data, What’s it all about?”, Ryan Levering shared how machine learning and structured data go hand in hand. When you take into consideration that machine learning is the building block for AI, an action you can take to prepare for more AI in search (such as Bard and ChatGPT) is to adopt structured data to inform the machine learning about your content and have it be fully understood.

By using semantic Schema Markup to develop your knowledge graph, AI can tap into this resource and be grounded in more context. This provides them with a richer understanding of your brand and its associated entities.

By developing your knowledge graph, you are creating AI search-ready content.

4. Control How Your Brand Appears in Search

Adding Schema Markup to your web pages lets you exercise greater control over your brand’s appearance in search, empowering you to shape and manage your brand image. One of the key advantages of implementing Schema Markup lies in its capacity to establish a robust control point within your Knowledge Graph, by enabling you to communicate essential information about your organization and entities directly to AI search engines.

Without structured data, search engines rely on algorithms to infer details about your business, which can lead to inaccuracies and misunderstandings. However, with Schema Markup, you take the reins, grounding and informing the AI systems with precise, structured data. By doing so, you mitigate the risk of search engine “hallucinations” – where the algorithms misinterpret or misrepresent your brand.

Imagine your website displays two prices for the same product: one for members and another for non-members. Left unchecked, AI search engines might not recognize the difference, potentially displaying incorrect information in the SERP.

This lack of differentiation can severely impact the trustworthiness and clarity of your brand. However, by clearly indicating which pricing you want displayed using Schema Markup, you can accurately communicate these distinctions, guiding search engines to present the correct pricing information to the users.

Schema Markup is your safeguard against such discrepancies, ensuring your brand and products are accurately represented and preventing any potential confusion for users.

5. Help You Stand Out in Search With Rich Results

When Google understands your Schema Markup, it can use this data to show your content as a rich result (also known as rich snippets) on the SERP.

A standard search result will deliver a title, URL, and meta description. However, rich results include captivating images that draw users’ eyes to your search result and web page.

In total, Google has more than 32 different types of rich results. You can classify your content as local business content, recipes, articles, event pages, and more. If you’re promoting an event, you can improve its visibility by adding Event Structured Data, making your page eligible to appear in the event experience section on Google.

Once you add Schema Markup to your page, you can use Google’s rich results test to see which rich result your page is eligible for. We also suggest using the Schema Markup Validator on Schema.org to detect any mistakes in your Structured Data.

If you want to ensure that your Schema Markup efforts align with your overall branding strategy, here are some examples of rich results you can consider using.

Review Snippets

Review snippets provide prospective customers with reviews and ratings from your past customers and help improve your brand’s credibility in search results.

Product

Product rich results reveal sought-after details like pricing, availability, etc. You can generate more leads and increase interest in your product offerings by providing consumers with this information on the SERP. Beyond the fundamentals, you can also expand your Product rich result to include price drops, ratings, reviews, shipping details and more.

6. Drive Business Results

Schema Markup is an SEO strategy that can provide your company with measurable results and a strong return on investment.

You can use tools like Google Search Console and Schema Performance Analytics to closely monitor how your newly marked-up pages are performing.

When implemented strategically, Schema Markup can:

• Help ensure that your content appears in search results for highly relevant queries. This means that the traffic you receive is more likely to be interested in your products or services, which leads to increased CTR and an overall higher likelihood of conversion and engagement.
• Make your search results more appealing and informative to users, leading to higher CTR. Rich results can provide users with additional information about your content, such as star ratings, prices, and product availability, making them more likely to click your link.
• Be particularly beneficial for local businesses. By marking up local business information, you can improve your visibility in local search results and map listings, driving foot traffic to your physical locations.

Achieving robust results with Schema Markup isn’t unusual. At Schema App, we’ve seen customers across a wide range of industries achieve great results with this SEO strategy.

For instance, SAP saw a 400% growth in clicks from rich results after working with our team, and Sharp Healthcare enjoyed an 843% increase in clicks in just nine months.

As more businesses recognize the benefits of Schema Markup, implementing it can give you a competitive edge. Your content will stand out in search results and provide a more comprehensive, informative, and trustworthy experience to users.

7. Attract Job Applicants

You can incorporate Schema Markup into job postings to help attract quality talent. By applying Structured Data to your job listing pages, your job posting will be eligible for display among Google’s job search experience results.

Top listings are displayed at the top of the SERP. If your listings make the cut, they’ll feature reviews, ratings from past employees, job details, and your company logo.

8. Improve Your Content Strategy

Chances are that you’re already investing heavily in creating SEO content, optimizing it for priority keywords, and engaging in other on-page SEO tactics to rank higher on the SERP. Unfortunately, your competitors are likely doing the same.

Fortunately, you can beat the competition and inform your content strategy by utilizing Schema Markup. Thinking about your content from the perspective of the rich results you want to achieve can help to generate ideas for new content or existing content. If you want your page to be eligible for a Review Snippet, you can improve your content by adding customer reviews and ratings on your site.

Start by looking at Google’s Structured Data Guidelines, then generate the required Schema Markup using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper or our Schema App Editor. Once you’ve generated the markup, you can add the Schema Markup to your pages so your content can stand out as a rich result.

You can go one step further to create connected Schema Markup by linking the topic covered in your content to the Wikipedia or Wikidata page for the specific topic within your Schema Markup.

Read our step-by-step guide to learn how to develop a Schema Markup strategy for your website.

Start implementing Schema Markup today

The benefits of Schema Markup are undeniable.

When you add Schema Markup to your website, you’ll help search engines understand your content and make your pages more visible in organic search. In turn, you’ll increase your click-through rates and generate more organic traffic for your web pages.

Any business with an online presence can generate measurable results using Structured Data. However, to tap into the full potential of Schema Markup and stand out online, you must build, manage and optimize it as part of your ongoing site strategy. Otherwise, you’ll encounter issues like Schema Drift which hinder your ability to achieve rich results.

The good news is you can streamline the implementation and management of your Schema Markup by working with Schema App. We work with enterprise SEO teams to fully leverage the benefits of Schema Markup. Contact us today to learn more.

The post 8 Benefits of Schema Markup and Why It’s Important for SEO appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

This January, we’ve seen December’s fluctuations turn into a steady rhythm of growth. There were also discussions about Google’s perspective on connected structured data. Here’s a roundup of what we’ve seen this past January.

Rich Results Performance in January 2023

Steady performance across all rich results

January was a fairly calm month on the search engine results page – a welcomed change from the second half of 2022. 

According to our data from Schema Performance Analytics, most rich results were trending positively in January in comparison to December.

FAQ Recovery from December Update

In December 2022, we saw the performance for FAQ rich results take a slight decline.

This is likely due to the rollout of Google’s December Helpful Content Update and link spam update, which affected rankings and traffic to many websites as observed by other SEOs. 

The Google search ranking algorithm volatility is still pretty hot, right before Christmas https://t.co/plitzoaipq pic.twitter.com/HWgLMFlxhI

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) December 23, 2022

Thankfully, the updates ended officially in January and we’ve seen the numbers recover and stabilize for the rest of the month. 

Connected vs. Unconnected Structured Data

This January, there was a conversation with John Mueller about whether Google had an SEO preference for connected structured data on Mastodon. 

While John said that Google has no preference, Ryan Levering, who primarily works on structured data at Google, agreed to John’s response but with a caveat on Mastodon. 

Here’s our takeaway from this discussion. 

Google cares about Schema Drift.

In Levering’s response, he said,

However, the caveat here is that when you do [structured data] in multiple blocks, there are sometimes conflict/duplication problems… We still see cases, where people throw unrelated markup about things (like related products) at the same top level as the main entity from different blocks on the page and that, makes it mostly noise.”

The duplication issue is also known as Schema Drift and happens when the structured data is out of sync with the content on your website. 

During the “Structured Data: What’s it all about?” episode of Google’s Search off the Record Podcast, Levering mentioned that their primary challenge with structured data is “figur[ing] out a way to verify that the structured data is accurate”. 

The challenge of verifying the accuracy of structured data is costly to Google, “so sometimes centralizing the logic makes it more consistent/correct,” said Levering. Keeping the structured data organized can reduce the risk of Schema Drift and this aligns with how we do structured data at Schema App. 

The Schema App Highlighter dynamically generates structured data from the content on your website. If your team changes the content on the page, your structured data will automatically update to reflect those changes. 

Connected structured data might not matter as much to Google today but it will in the future.

Also, over time richer/correct semantics will favour more connected graphs.” 

During the podcast, Levering also spoke about how machine learning can use structured data as a data source. If machine learning uses structured data to validate or understand the content, connected structured data will teach the machine to infer the meaning and connections between different entities on the site. 

Even though Google doesn’t utilize connected structured data today,  they are likely headed in that direction in the future. However, creating connected structured data can be complicated and hard to manage. 

At Schema App, we do more than just achieve rich results through structured data. We help our customers create their own knowledge graph and connect it with other knowledge graphs available on the web. 

With our background in semantic technology, our goal is to support our users’ SEO goals while also connecting their domains with the people, places, things and concepts that have been described by other authorities like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google’s Knowledge Graph. In engaging with Schema App, you are leveraging a global collective intelligence and transforming your data into knowledge.

Connected Schema Markup is essential to this work. That’s why we developed the Schema Paths Tool, to help users connect different schema types and determine the path that best articulates the relationships in their web content.

Conclusion

Rich results are merely the tip of the structured data iceberg. 

At its most basic level, structured data increases search engines’ understanding of your content, which corresponds to an increase in traffic and engagement to your site. At an advanced level, structured data provides search engines with context to the contents on your page, which transforms data into knowledge for future applications. 

If you are interested in generating connected structured data, we can help. Get in touch with us today to learn more about our solutions.

The post January 2023 Rich Results Weather Report appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

At Schema App, our Customer Success Team is constantly navigating and pivoting through these changes to help our customers maintain and grow their visibility in search. As such, we’ve gathered some key insights from our team on their learnings from 2022 and what they expect to see for Schema Markup in 2023.

Insight #1. Google is investing a lot in Structured Data

In 2020, Google invested heavily in COVID-related Structured Data changes. In 2021, things were quieter and we saw fewer activities.

This year, Google introduced significant updates to their Structured Data documentation and 2023 is likely to maintain the same momentum.

Machine learning complements Structured Data

In April 2022, Google released an episode on their Search off the Record Podcast called “Structured Data: What’s it all about?”.

In the episode, Ryan Levering shared how Google uses Structured Data to complement their machine-learning work. Structured Data is currently provided by users to help Google understand the content on a page and improve the accuracy of its search results. Levering has emphasized that “it’s always good to empower people who are giving you data, to have control over that.” Rather than rendering Structured Data obsolete, machine learning will fill the information gaps or “enhance coverage of the feature” on Google search.

According to Levering, Google will also “…continue to flesh out the Structured Data usage in terms of adding more features and looking into more ways [they] can use it in cooler things that are not just visual treatments but actually help with more understanding on the page”. This is reflected in the changes we saw in 2022 and foreshadows what is to come in the new year.

Notable changes from Google in 2022

Changes in Video rich results

In June 2022, we observed a decrease in clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results on desktop. This trend was also noticed by other SEOs. At the same time, we noticed a change in how the Video Rich Results were being presented on the SERPs.

Data provided by Schema App / Schema Performance Analytics

The Video Rich Results showing up on the ‘All’ search results page only featured Youtube videos. Upon clicking on these results, users would be directed to the video’s Youtube page rather than the site where the video was embedded. Learn more about the changes in Video rich results here.

Volatility in FAQ rich results

In April 2022, 65% of our clients experienced a drop in clicks on their FAQ rich results and saw their results recover again in May. This happened again in August 2022, only for the results to recover again in late October.

Data provided by Schema App / Schema Performance Analytics

Despite the disruptiveness of these fluctuations, you should not “abandon certain rich result targeting should performance start to drop”, says Kevin Veilleux, a Customer Success Manager at Schema App.

“As we saw with Videos and FAQ, there’s value in staying the course”.

Major developments in Product search results

This past year, Google also made waves in Product search. Google is enabling more Products to be shown on the SERP, which comes as no surprise as their competition with Amazon heats up in the eCommerce space.

Expanding eligibility for Merchant Listing Experiences with Product Structured Data

In September 2022, Google announced that businesses can now be eligible for Merchant Listing Experiences by adding Product Structured Data to their web pages. At the same time, they added more recommended Product Structured Data properties such as colours, size, and material for merchant listings.

New Merchant Listings report on Google Search Console

On top of expanding the eligibility for Merchant Listing Experiences with Product Structured Data, Google also introduced a new Merchant Listing Report on GSC. This new report will help merchants identify Structured Data errors, warnings and valid pages for free listing experiences in search.

New Pros and Cons enhancement for editorial Product review pages

Product reviews are a helpful resource in the buyer journey and Google added a new ‘Pros and Cons’ enhancement to the product review snippets. Businesses can add Pros and Cons Structured Data on their pages with product reviews to be eligible for this new enhancement.

2022 was a busy year for Structured Data and we see this as a signal of its growing importance in Google’s search environment. What does this mean for SEO teams in 2023? It means, it’s time for SEO teams to start prioritizing Structured Data as part of their SEO strategy.

Insight #2. Invest in your SEO Structured Data strategy as soon as possible to stay ahead of the competition

According to research by the HTTP Archive, the usage of Structured Data has increased in 2022, in comparison to 2021. Of the websites they surveyed, they found that the use of JSON-LD on homepages increased from 34% in 2021 to 37% in 2022 on mobile devices. This upward trend of Structured Data usage reflects the growing popularity of Structured Data as an SEO strategy, and we predict this trend to continue in 2023.

The HTTP Archive’s research also showed that WebSite, Organization and Local Business were three of the most used Schema.org types in 2022. Even though more sites are implementing Structured Data, many of them are implementing it on a basic level.Image by HTTP Archive

Google has over 32 rich result opportunities and there are many other types of Structured Data that have yet to be utilized en masse. There is no better time to invest in a more complex Structured Data strategy to stay ahead of this growing trend.

At Schema App, we’ve seen other Schema.org types and their Rich Results like FAQPage, Product, and Reviews performing well for our customers.

You can also opt for other eye-catching interactive rich results like Aggregate Ratings, HowTo and Video. These untapped opportunities could help your organization stand out in search against your competitors and drive click-through rates and conversions on your site. 

How to get started with a Schema Markup strategy

Before you start, you have to set a goal for what you want to achieve and the metrics you want to move. If you want to drive clicks, impressions or CTR for pages that are essential to your business, Schema Markup can help.

1. Identify the key pages on your site that you want to target with rich results. (i.e. your location pages, product pages, physician pages, etc.) You might want to start by testing out a few pages for a specific rich result.
2. Check if the content on your page fulfills Google’s required Structured Data properties for the targeted rich result. If it does not, review Google’s required Structured Data properties and add the required content to make your page eligible for the targeted rich result.
3. Once you have the required content on your page, apply Schema Markup to make your page eligible for the targeted rich result. You can add Schema Markup to individual unique pages using our Editor tool, or at a larger scale using our Highlighter tool.
4. After applying the Schema Markup to your page, test your results to ensure the markup is eligible using Google’s Rich Results test tool.
5. To measure the results, use Google Search Console or Schema App’s Schema Performance Analytics tool to compare the performance of your optimized pages to the rest of your site, or compare the performance of the optimized pages before and after the implementation of Schema Markup to see how it has contributed to your desired outcome.

Learn how to develop a Schema Markup strategy for your website here.

Insight #3. Diversify your Schema Markup strategy

As we saw in 2022, there can be a lot of volatility around Google’s rich results. In June, we saw Video rich results on desktop disappear for many of our customers, causing a change in site traffic. In August, we saw FAQ rich results settling to new levels following the Helpful Content Update.

We expect Google to continue experimenting/changing/introducing new things in 2023, which necessitates the need for more diverse content for rich result targeting,” says Veilleux.

Organizations that have more diversity in their rich results are less impacted when an algorithm change targets a specific type of rich result. Here’s how you can start diversifying your Schema Markup strategy.

1. Monitor your rich results on Google Search Console

To start, you need to know which rich results you are currently achieving. Most of this information is available on Google Search Console, or through Schema Performance Analytics for Schema App enterprise customers.

Once you know which rich results you are currently achieving, explore Google’s search gallery to see other rich results your content could be eligible for.

2. Maintain thorough markup

Google’s required and recommended Structured Data properties only make up a small percentage of the properties available for Schema.org types.

At Schema App, one of our best practices is to markup page content with all the relevant properties available through Schema.org, not just what Google has listed as required or recommended. By ensuring markup is as descriptive as possible, Schema App supports semantic SEO beyond attaining rich result eligibility.

This year, when authoring the Schema Markup for our customer’s Product pages, we marked up their images even though it wasn’t a required property for Product rich results. Shortly after, Google expanded the eligibility for Merchant Listing Experiences with Product Structured Data and image was a required property for it. As a result, our customer was instantly eligible for Merchant Listing rich results.

By marking up as many properties as you can, you are optimizing all eligible content on your page to maximize your opportunities for rich results both now and in the future.

Insight #4. Content and Structured Data go hand in hand

SEO is a team sport and results happen when you work together. Schema Markup strategy can be challenging for SEO teams when they’re siloed off from content and unable to make additions or updates.

For your Schema Markup strategy to succeed, your content needs to:

1. Match the intent of search queries, and
2. Align with Google’s required and recommended Structured Data properties for your targeted type.

Content must match the intent of the searcher

The quality of your content is a key factor to a successful Schema Markup strategy. With Google’s recent Helpful Content Update, we see Google drilling down into the quality of the content. If your content does not meet the needs of the searcher, Google will not award you with a rich result.

We saw this firsthand after Google’s rolled out the Helpful Content Update in August. After the update, content previously receiving FAQ rich results lost the feature because the “questions” were actually statements or headings that did not match user queries.

Align your content with the Structured Data requirements 

Content is at the core of your Schema Markup strategy. Letting your content team know what content needs to be on a page for your SEO team to mark up is the best way to ensure alignment. That way, every piece of content produced is more likely to drive clicks and conversions.

How to align content with Structured Data

1. Make sure your content team knows Google’s content requirements for rich result eligibility

If your content team is looking to drive more traffic to Blog posts, make sure they know what Google’s required and recommended properties are. They should also keep these required and recommended properties in mind when creating other types of new content on an ongoing basis.

2. Use Google’s rich result documentation as a guideline for what constitutes “high-quality content”.

“The required and recommended properties are a “cheat guide” for what might be important and relevant to end users AND Google’s algorithm,” says Ruby Ross, Customer Success Manager at Schema App.

When developing new content, looking at Google’s required and recommended properties can give you a good idea of what Google has decided is important for users to know, and align your content with that.

Insight #5. Experiment with Structured Data

Google is constantly experimenting and updating its algorithms to best meet the searcher’s needs. This year, we saw many updates to the SERP and Google’s Structured Data documentation. These changes reaffirm that you shouldn’t take a set-in-and-forget-it approach to Structured Data on your site (read our article on schema drift). You have to be ready to deploy the necessary changes when Google makes an update.

Our Highlighter tool’s dynamic deployment enables our customers to easily apply markup changes at scale within minutes to keep up with Google’s changes. It also means you can easily experiment with new types of Schema Markup and properties at scale.

Experimenting with new types of rich results can help your organization diversify and proactively adapt to Google’s changes. At Schema App, our Customer Success Team runs experiments with our customers every quarter. The experiments vary based on our customers’ desired outcomes and strategies.

Examples of the experiments include:

• Experimenting with different rich results on the same page set to see which rich result performs better
• Experimenting with adding rich result-eligible content to drive traffic to high-priority pages (i.e. FAQs for BlogPosts)
• Experimenting with different properties for a single rich result (e.g. Pros and Cons, or lowPrice vs. highPrice for Product)

These experiments help our customers uncover opportunities, diversify their rich results, and optimize their Schema Markup strategy to maximize their results.

Insight #6. Schema Markup is a safe bet during a recession

The recession is looming over many marketing teams as we wade through tighter cash flows and smaller budgets for the new year. However, maintaining market share and keeping up with the competition is more important than ever.

Measurable ROI

In times like these, marketing teams should invest in strategies that have a measurable return on investment. Schema Markup is one of them.

When you add Schema Markup to your pages and achieve rich results, you’ll want to see the clicks and impressions that you’ve achieved specifically from the URLs that are getting these rich results.

We created the Schema Performance Analytics (SPA) tool with this in mind. With the SPA Page Level Report, users can see the performance of URLs with Schema Markup and calculate if the increase in traffic drives more revenue for their business.

As Schema Markup becomes a growing trend, there has never been a better time to experiment and invest in this strategy. You can justify the investment by starting small and measuring its impact on your business results.

Point of Differentiation

Implementing a Schema Markup strategy for your site also serves as a point of differentiation if you operate in a competitive industry.

Based on an analysis across our entire customer set, pages with markup from Schema App have a 40% higher click-through rate than pages without. The click-through rate for pages achieving rich results is notably higher than those without. In 2022, we also saw the click-through rate for pages with FAQ, Videos, and Q&A rich results performing exceptionally well.

If your competitors aren’t using Schema Markup, your brand and pages can stand out on the SERP and get more traffic onto your site. Investing and experimenting with Structured Data at a time when teams are more risk-averse can help your organization gain greater visibility on the SERP and beat the competition.

Conclusion

Needless to say, our Schema App team has learned a lot from 2022. As we enter 2023 with uncertain economic conditions, understanding what is working, what is delivering value and what you can scale is vital.

Schema Markup is a scalable SEO strategy that delivers measurable results and returns. If you haven’t invested in Schema Markup, 2023 is a good time to start. If you have budgetary constraints, you can always start small and expand when you see results. Your SEO and content teams should also be working cross-functionally to ensure every piece of content you invest in aligns with the Structured Data best practices to maximize clicks.

If you are looking to start or take your Schema Markup strategy to the next level, we can help! Get in touch with our team today to learn more about our scalable end-to-end Schema Markup solution.

The post Schema Markup SEO in 2023: What To Expect appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Rich Result Changes in October 2022

Product, Reviews and Video are steady

After a turbulent last few months, we are happy to report that we are seeing growth in Product rich results, and steady increases in clicks on Review Snippets and Video rich results. It is definitely a relief to see some calming results after the stormy summer.

We are also happy to start to be able to share some industry data. In 2022, we’ve seen the most rich results being awarded to our Enterprise customers in the area of Video, Product and FAQ.

Data source: Schema App – Schema Performance Analytics

FAQ Rich Results Continue to Change

FAQ is one of the rich results that has had significant fluctuations this year. We continued to see an impact on the FAQ rich results, which is congruent with other reports in the industry.

52.17% of our customers saw a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the October however, impressions are increasing. The decrease in clicks is subtle, but not growing with impressions. We are seeing this across industries and are monitoring it closely to be able to attribute it to a specific strategy or content approach.

Data source: Schema App – Schema Performance Analytics

Other SEOs have observed this similar trend occurring in October but across a wider time frame. Is this the result of the October 2022 Spam update? The rollout was completed on October 21st, so the timing is off.

Is Google showing fewer FAQ rich results and maybe other results recently? https://t.co/F1idQOaN6J via @randymajors and @RankRanger pic.twitter.com/KSlXbV08wb

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) October 25, 2022

Barry for the win, with additional insight that another algorithm change had occurred on October 28th. This aligns more with the data we are seeing. There are additional changes going on with Google’s algorithm AFTER the spam update, and these changes are specifically impacting FAQ clicks.

Google search ranking algorithm update or adjustment on October 28th (unconfirmed) https://t.co/NfejjTKS4Y pic.twitter.com/mGmFa6olwK

— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) November 1, 2022

@rustybrick It seems Google drastically reduced showing FAQ Rich Results in SER across the board about the same time as the Oct 19 spam rollout. Checked several queries on both desktop and mobile and only saw 1 site with a few FAQs appear. Any confirmation of this? Policy change?

— Randy Majors (@randymajors) October 24, 2022

Source: Marie Haynes Report

The good news is that the FAQ rich result has grown overall in 2022, and the early days of November are showing hopeful results. We’ll be monitoring performance week-over-week to see if there is any correlation with content or industry.

Data source: Schema App – Schema Performance Analytics

Google Updates in October 2022

Schema.org V15 Released with more properties for Products

Schema.org released another version with a focus on adding new properties in pending for products. One of the new properties to highlight is the positiveNotes and negativeNotes for use on Product. This property allows users to showcase the pros and cons of a product, and was created in support of a new structured data feature announced in August for Product Reviews.

Good news! Schema App already supports Schema.org v15 if you want to try out the new pros and cons new search feature.

Provide a site name on Google by adding WebSite Structured Data

When Google lists a page on the search engine results page, the result shows the name of the site that the page is from – also known as the site name.

Previously, Google would automatically generate a site name by using sources such as

• Content in <title> elements
• Heading elements, such as <h1> elements
• Og:site_name

This October, Google announced that you can indicate your preferred site name by adding WebSite Structured Data. The site names are currently supported at a domain level, and not at the subdomain or subdirectory level.  

These changes indicate Google’s increased use of Structured Data as a key source of information. 

New Image Structured Data Properties

Google has added 3 new Structured Data properties – creditText, creator and copyrightNotice – that can be used with the ImageObject type to provide support for image credits, copyright and creator information. 

“Previously, you could only provide image credit information with IPTC photo metadata.”

By adding these Structured Data properties, web publishers can simplify the way they add creator data and add it in a scalable way across their sites. 

According to Schema.org, this is what each property is for:  

• creditText: Text that can be used to credit person(s) and/or organization(s) associated with a published Creative Work.
• creator: The creator/author of this CreativeWork. This is the same as the Author property for CreativeWork.
• copyrightNotice: Text of a notice appropriate for describing the copyright aspects of this Creative Work, ideally indicating the owner of the copyright for the Work.”

Unlike the IPTC photo metadata, you will need to add Structured Data every time you use the photo on your site. 

What’s interesting about this new use of Structured Data is that it is being used beyond search. This information is helping Google understand the copyright of the image. Are more teams at Google using Structured Data beyond search features? Only time will tell. 

To do machine learning, Google needs to broaden its data sources. They now get data from their crawls, Merchant Center, user clicks, and Structured Data.

Measure ROI of Schema Markup using Schema Performance Analytics

One of the things we love about Schema Markup is that you can attribute clicks directly to this nerdy SEO strategy. To help our customers measure the impact, we’ve recently released our Schema Performance Analytics Page-Level Reporting Dashboard.

This new Page Level Report combines data from Google Search Console and the Schema App Highlighter and Editor, to provide users with more granular page-level insights on their Schema Markup performance. 

Users can also filter their data by groups of URLs to better understand how the Schema Markup is performing for different lines of business or departments. This allows our customers to better measure the ROI of Schema Markup on each business unit and the impact SEO has on their business outcomes. 

Read more about Schema Performance Analytics Page Level Report on our blog.

Conclusion

This last quarter, we have seen a record number of core algorithm changes from Google. 

We are seeing rich results – like FAQs – fluctuate, which further emphasizes the need for diversity in your Schema Markup portfolio so that you can not only weather these changes but also thrive in them. 

Want to hear more? Listen to Martha’s latest podcast on Voices of Search, on how you can manage your Schema Markup like a financial portfolio. 

The post October 2022 Rich Results Weather Report Update appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Two key takeaways:

• Search is changing – with Google making updates to the SERP, in Video, FAQ, and Product Rich results.
• Diversify your rich results and manage your Schema Markup to achieve optimal results in changing search landscape. 

Rich Result Changes in September 2022

FAQ Rich Result Changes

This past August, we reported seeing 42% of our customers experience a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results across mobile and desktop. 

This trend has continued into September as we continue to see 45.88% of our customers drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the first two weeks of the month and 43.53% of our customers have continued to see a drop in clicks for their FAQ rich results in the second half of September. To date, we’re seeing this decline affect a wide range of industries. 

Healthcare is one of the industries that took a huge hit. 57% of our healthcare customers saw a further decrease in clicks and impressions this September. Google is no longer awarding the FAQ rich results for Physician pages, resulting in a decline in clicks for their FAQ rich results. However, many of these customers are still getting clicks from the FAQ rich results on their services and blog pages. 

We have yet to identify the cause of the decline for other industries but we do know that Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. FAQ rich results continue to perform, however, organizations should be reviewing their Schema Markup strategy to ensure they have a diversified portfolio of rich results.

This means reviewing the rich results your organization is achieving today and proactively looking for content on your site that is eligible for more types of rich results opportunities. Diversifying your rich results allows your website to keep performing despite Google’s changes and your team can quickly double down when a specific rich result is performing. 

Google preferring Youtube for Video Rich Results

We first observed a sharp decline in clicks and impressions for Video Rich Results in June, where 70% of our customers saw a decrease in the performance of their Video Rich Results on desktop devices. The Video Rich Results started to recover in August until this sudden drop again in September. 

In the first half of September, we saw 41.86% of our customers decline in clicks and a 53.49% decline in impressions for their Video Rich Results compared to the second half of August. 

In addition to the number of customers impacted, we also saw a big change in how Video rich results are showing up in the SERP. Google is preferring Youtube over other providers. 

Could this be a result of Google’s September core update or is it just Google continuing to refine the search experience? Stay tuned to find out. For now, we will continue to monitor the Video rich results every week to see how this trend progresses over time. 

Growth of Impressions for Recipe Rich Results

In August, 83% of our customers reported seeing the impressions for their Recipe rich results grow at an average of 3513% compared to July. 

This September, we are continuing to see an upward trend in the clicks and impressions for Recipe rich results with 60% of our customers seeing growth in impressions for their Recipe rich results. 

Google Updates in September 2022

More Product Search Features can be achieved with Product Schema Markup

On September 13, Google announced that merchants can now be eligible for merchant listing experiences simply by adding Product Schema Markup to their web pages, even if they do not have a Google Merchant Center account. 

This is awesome news! Now instead of just getting review ratings, price and availability, Product Schema Markup can help you achieve new experiences in search. With Google and Amazon battling for product search, we see this as Google’s move towards enabling more products to be shown on the SERP. 

Google currently has two broad categories of experiences:

1. Merchant listing experiences for web pages that allow shoppers to buy a product on the site.
   
   In the past, these merchant listing experiences (Shopping Knowledge panel, Popular products rich result, shopping experiences in Google Images and Google lens) were only open to users with Google Merchant Center accounts and the product details shown in these rich results were supplied from the Google Merchant Center feed.
2. Product snippets for a broader set of web pages with product information (including pages that sell products, publish product reviews, and/or aggregate information from other sites).
   
   In the past, these product snippets were powered by schema.org Product Schema Markup. This is now no longer the case.

The Google Merchant Center feeds are no longer necessary for merchants to be eligible for these enhanced Product search features. Google has added more Product Schema properties (i.e. colours, size, material, pattern, audience, hasEnergyConsumptionDetails, etc.), which allows merchants to add more product details to their Schema Markup and achieve the rich results that drive traffic to their site. 

To help you monitor and manage your Product rich results, Google has introduced two new Search Console Reports. 

1. Merchant listing report
   This is a new report that identifies Schema Markup issues for free listing experiences in the search results. Merchants that sell products on their online should use this report.
2. Product snippets report
   This report replaces the previous Product report with adjustments related to the separation of the merchant listing report. The data from the previous Product report is still available within this report. The report identifies Schema Markup issues for product snippets in the search results. Sites that don’t sell products online but still publish pages with Product Schema Markup should use this report.

September Core and Product Review Update

This month, Google rolled out their September Core Update (the second broad core update of the year) and the Product Reviews Update. Both updates came after the Helpful Content Update finished rolling out on September 9, 2022. We have yet to correlate the impact of these updates with the fluctuations in the search results. However, we will continue to monitor and report on any fluctuations we’ve observed.

Google using Structured Data for Machine Learning

Marie Haynes and Alan Kent from Google released a podcast episode on Product Reviews this September. 

In the episode, Alan Kent said “They look at behaviour to decide if the review is helpful. The machine learning then looks at patterns to see if the review is helpful.” 

This wasn’t the first mention of machine learning from Google in the past year. 

In the podcast, “Structured Data what’s it all about” on April 7, 2022, Ryan Levering from Google said, “Most of our features over time migrate to that approach where we ingest it. Maybe we start with one approach where we’re just using ML. And then we eventually add markups so people have control. Or it’s the opposite way around. And we start– we bootstrap with markup in an eco-system approach where people are giving us data. And then we enhance coverage of the feature by adding ML long run.” (Ryan Levering @ 8:34)

To do machine learning, Google needs to broaden its data sources. They now get data from their crawls, Merchant Center, user clicks, and Structured Data.

Conclusion

Google is making a lot of updates to the algorithm and evolving how they are using machine learning to delight the user in their search experience. As a result of these changes, SEOs need to diversify their rich result portfolio, stay agile and be ready to evolve their content and Schema Markup to capitalize on the changes.

Schema Markup (aka Structured Data) helps search engines understand your content because you’re translating it into machine language. With Google relying more on machine learning, Schema Markup will increasingly be of greater importance for sites to communicate with Google’s machines and maintain their visibility on the SERP.

If you haven’t already implemented Schema Markup as part of your SEO strategy, what are you waiting for? Get in touch with us today to learn how Schema App can help your organization stand out in search through Schema Markup.

The post September 2022 Rich Results Weather Report Update appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Iram and the team at Schema App will be keeping a close eye on Rich Result volatility and as we see trends we’ll share them.

The post FAQPage Rich Results Weather Report May 2022 appeared first on Schema App Solutions.

Marking up your website with schema translates your content into a language that search engines can understand. This means more relevant results for users, and the opportunity to appear in voice search for enabled devices. One effective way to optimize content for voice search is with frequently asked questions and FAQ schema.

How to stand out in search with FAQ Rich Results

The first rule of schema markup is to only markup content that is visible on the page. Of course, there is no guarantee that using schema markup will display your content as rich results. This is why aligning your schema strategy with your content is so important. For many brands, website content is constantly changing to respond to evolving audience expectations. The Schema App Highlighter dynamically updates your markup to reflect any content changes, meaning you’re always ready to match with relevant search queries. 

Schema markup is complicated and time-consuming, especially if your website content—like your company blog or news information—is updated regularly. Schema App offers full-service enterprise schema markup solutions that integrate easily with any website.

The post FAQ Rich Results: Content Is Key For Schema Markup appeared first on Schema App Solutions.